


Its Alright

by Rose The Wizard (1thy_truth_is_won0)



Category: Brothers Bloom (2008)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post-Movie
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-10
Updated: 2012-11-09
Packaged: 2017-11-18 08:25:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/558890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1thy_truth_is_won0/pseuds/Rose%20The%20Wizard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bloom was not sure if they really were running from Russian mobsters, or from Dog, or from no one, but they did had to leave St. Petersburg all the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

Bloom was not sure if they really were running from Russian mobsters, or from Dog, or from no one, but they did had to leave St. Petersburg all the same.

 

At a hotel in Rio, He and Penelope wondered what to do next. Thanks to Penelope, money was not and probably will never be a problem. Before now, all both of them did was occupy time. They resolved to do something a bit more. The goal wasn’t to change the world but to keep Bloom from drinking in a hammock and Penelope from collecting hobbies with no plan.

 

This was certain- they had each other, what they always wanted and it was real.

 

They were had lunch at an outdoor café looking at the mixture of the rich and colorful, with poor and gritty against an impossible blue sky and gold sun.

 

“Maybe I should open an antique shop,” Bloom mused as he folded a tip of his napkin.

 

“And I’ll be a photographer.”

 

They traveled for a while, going wherever they liked wherever seemed interesting. It was fun. They ended up in Chicago and got an apartment. It would be good just feel the place out and see if it was a place where they would want to stay.

 

Two weeks moving in, Penelope went to a festival in a park he forget the name of. Bloom was thumbing through an Agatha Christie novel, had to cross off a red herring, when he felt his phone vibrate. He checked around to see that no one else was in the aisle and then fished out the phone.

 

“Hello?”

 

“Bloom comer over!” Penelope said, “I think I’m getting a job!”

 

The festival was one of many where artists and craftsmen sold their goods, and the vendors all sold beer, soda and food that you can eat a lot as long as you don’t ask what’s in it. Penelope found the activities tent, where families took their kids. She then commandeered a table, where she taught three little girls how to draw a face. Then she taught them how to make a pinhole camera with cardboard tubes. Other children came to the table as she was demonstrating how to juggle.

 

Soon she was showing them all everything she knew how to do. Well, everything that a kid could do without incident. The supervisors noticed.

 

Bloom was introduced to these people, and the conversation returned to what Penelope was offered.

 

“This is a bit unorthodox for us,” explained the head supervisor, a tiny plump woman with long hair and grey streaks, “But we’re starting a new after school program and some people had to drop out, so we have some positions we need to fill.”

 

So Penelope arranged with them for an interview.

 

“Not to sound negative or unsupportive, but do you have the qualifications? Or are they providing a training program?” Bloom asked.

 

“I have a Masters,” she replied. “Somehow it included education.”

 

 Bloom raised his eyebrows in surprised, he did not know that. “You have a Masters?”

 

“Correspondence course from New Jersey State. In Art History and Photography,” Penelope slurped her soda, “You?”

 

“Two degrees in psychology and philosophy and three PhDs- two are real, the rest are forged and all under a different name. Legally, I have up to an 8th grade education.”

 

Penelope went to the interview, then a follow-up interview, and got a position as a counselor and tutor from 3: 30 to 5:00 pm; she went and taught kids all the things she learned. She went to work with a binder and boxes with things have no value until she made something out of them.

 

She smiled and laughed and told about what would happen in that hour and half, so Bloom knew she was happy.

 

Another day after all that, Bloom saw a flyer that caught his interest about a play and decided to go the small theater. He didn’t go to the play, but the auditions to see everyone else. Bloom sat down and watched the auditions. He read the play plenty of times before and knew every line. They then saw him, asked who he was and why he was there.  He answered truthfully, that he was watching the auditions. And then he signed up for it and the last one to audition.

 

 Bloom knew how to play a part, what it took to pull off a show.

 

“Where did you trained,” asked another actor, clearly impressed.

 

Bloom remembered times where he would go by names not his, cackle bladder and an occasional explosion and riding off into sunset ending that Stephan wrote. He decided to go by one version of the truth.

 

 “Nowhere official,” Bloom said. “My brother and I had a small troupe. He wrote the stories, I played the parts.”

 

“Theater family, that’s cool. Where your brother now? Is he published anywhere?”

 

“No, we were pretty freelance. He died last year.”

 

The role was small but he enjoyed it and they liked his work and he had a place to work. After the play ended, the company asked if he could audition again.

 

Bloom wondered if he was sliding back, him still playing roles. Or maybe he was in some mind-boggling way, selling out. But before, after he played the role, he would have nothing but Stephan and a bottle of scotch. So although he still played roles written by others, he then goes to Penelope and their home.

 

They moved out of the apartment and bought a house that was lovingly called a “fixer-upper” that they would fix to their liking and with few neighbors.

 

Over breakfast, Bloom mused if he should keep on acting and Penelope lets him know that its fine if he does or doesn’t and that she was looking up on how to re-tile basements. She also told him that they offered her a full time position at the school but she likes where she is.

 

So this may not be the rest of their lives, but Bloom and Penelope liked it here and it’ll do at present.


	2. Chapter 2

Over a year passed and they still liked their new lives together. Then Penelope came to him with a strange expression on her face. She down next to him and Bloom put down the script he was asked to look over, and he knew they were about talked about something big.

 

Penelope then revealed, “I called Bang-Bang.”

 

Bloom raised his eyebrows just a centimeter, “Today?”

 

She shook her head, “When we were at Rio. I wanted to know, for sure, if she was really…”

 

Bloom let the sentence not be finished, interrupting her.

 

“Was she?”

 

“I got the voicemail.” She flipped her phone.

 

“So nothing changed?”

 

“Not then, but today it did. This morning I just got a text from her,” and showed him the display on her phone.

 

The text said ‘Howdy’ and had an address in Washington D.C.

 

What to do next was make sure they don’t leave the stove on. Penelope called the school and let them know she won’t be in for a while and Bloom gave the script back and they took a plane to D.C. They didn’t know if Bang-Bang would be there or that it would be someone else- someone who was not good. But they had to go to know, to confirm, or to discover.

 

The address was to a cemetery. Standing by the gate, smoking a cigarette and decked in white was Bang-Bang. Penelope ran over and hugged the bomb specialist and she hugged back. Bloom loomed over them and when they let go, he had a smile for her.  Bloom noticed that she was a brunette now and hair was cut in a short conservative way.

 

“Hello.”

 

Bang-Bang smiled back and they went into the gates led by her. The cemetery was nothing special, just another graveyard with grass and trees and tombstones. It seemed welcoming in the day, heck birds could be heard chirping happily.

 

 

They finally stopped, at one grave nearby a bush. Bloom read the name carved into the granite.  It was his brother’s grave. Next to him were their parents.

 

Bloom only had the vaguest memory of his parents and his first life. Stephan filled him in on the details and it amazed him how ordinary they started out. Dad was a bus driver and Mom was a grocer. They lived an apartment in an okay neighborhood and paid their taxes. Then their parents died in a car accident and that life ended. The life of vagabond orphans began, living out of a suitcase, was the memory Bloom truly remembered.

 

He doesn’t remember grieving for his parent’s death and end of that life but he did grieve for Stephan once he saw that the red on his shirt turned brown. The story of the brothers ended.

 

Bang-Bang filled in on some of the chapters he missed. From the beginning Stephan planned for Bloom to leave with Penelope and start an unwritten life. Per Stephan’s instructions, Bang-Bang left in an explosive way. The funny thing was that the ending to the story, the actual con, was rather ambiguous with only one definite ending.  The con became reality because in reality, unexpected things happen. Diamond Dog’s betrayal and revenge was unexpected but his older brother was determined for him to get away. Which happened so Stephan’s story, though went through a crazy rewrite, was told.

 

When Stephan died, Bang-Bang stuck around. She arranged for him to be found and identified, then arranged for him to be extradited and buried next to their parents. For Bloom, knowing that Stephan was laid to rest with their parents and not rotting in an abandon theater made him feel better.

 

Since it was an overdue wake, Bloom and the girls went out and found a bar that Stephan would have liked. He paid for Bang-Bang’s tab because he did not know how else he could ever pay her back, especially when she gave him an actual death certificate.

 

That night, when they all turned in at the hotel, Bloom stared at the certificate. Penelope sat next to him and gave one of her hugs just for him.

 

The next morning, he slept in late and when he arrived at the hotel dining room, Penelope was eating pancakes and Bang-Bang was having Fruity Pebbles.

 

“Bang-Bang wants us to help her out.”

 

“With what?” Bloom poured himself some coffee.

  

Bang-Bang gave him a card with a name written on it - Daniel.

 

“You’re picking up this guy?” Bloom asked.

 

Bang-Bang nodded yes and had another spoonful of cereal. Then she wanted them to take this Daniel to Chicago.

 

“So we’re meeting him at the airport. Which one?”

 

Penelope replied, “Oh, he’s already here. We’re picking him up at the Russian Embassy.”

 

“So what are our aliases?”

 

She rolled her eyes and assured them that there were no need for aliases and the guy was not much trouble, only foreign and needed a ride.

 

 

Bloom was understandably nervous when they went into the gates of the Russian Embassy. They passed the security with ease, signed in at the front desk, and were taken to one office. So far, no handcuffs were clamp on. Maybe it helped they all dressed conservatively, even Bang-Bang was in her own suit (seriously, she could be a high powered office lady).

 

In the office, a Spartan room with a plain rug, and functional furniture and no expensive paintings or antiques. There were official looking men in expensive suits, and one balding man in an off the rack- suit- with a kind face, holding an armful of folders and not Russian.

 

Penelope introduced them all in Russian, and a round of handshakes commenced. Though his Russian was a bit rusty, he was able to catch “Good afternoon,” and “we are happy we were to be of service” and something about asylum.

 

Finally, English came in, and it was from the off- the- rack guy, “We will need your name on record. Formality.”

 

“Penelope Andrea Stamp,” Penelope smiled.

 

“Bloom,” he replied, not entirely comfortable saying it to bureaucratic strangers, but they would need a full name, so he continued, “Leopold David Bloom.”

 

The off the rack suit guy then had him and Penelope signed a document, the Russian suits then had them sign a few documents. They had facial expressions that suggested that everything went well so Bloom guessed that they were almost done.

 

For the next ten minutes, off- the- rack guy looked over the documents until he looked satisfied.

 

“Alright, I’ll get Daniel.” He said and the left.

 

The head Russian suit then said something, Bloom fully understood, “Sorry for all this, but we had to make sure, for his sake.”

 

Bloom nodded in agreement. The off the rack suit then he came back with a kid. Bloom was a good enough actor to feign recognition and hide his shock.

 

The off- the- rack guy spoke in a reassuring tone to the boy, but he showed only mild interest to what was being said.

 

It was hard to tell if the kid was in the dark as they were, or knew what was going on, or anything. His face was unreadable, so Bloom just had to glean what he could get from the surface. Daniel was about eleven or twelve, a bit scrawny not helped by the loose fitting trousers and a baggy blue sweater. He was pale with dark blonde hair that was close cropped. He had blue eyes that were not angelic.

 

At first glance, the kid was nothing special- he could go to school and watch TV. A second glance would say that the kid could easily be holding a shotgun right to the face.

 

Bloom sneaked a glance to Penelope, who had the expression that she wore to hide the fact this was all freaky scary and she knew the only way to make it out, was to make sure the plan went on accordingly.

 

Daniel waved hello to Bang-Bang, to which she tilted her head to. Another round of handshakes came and they were sent off their merry way. They left, with no questions, no signing out, and no stopping. Since the kid obviously knew Bang-Bang, they let him wander over to her side and walk with her.

 

Bloom only had one question when it was over.

 

Why did they smuggle in a child?

**Author's Note:**

> I need a beta for the next chapter.


End file.
